Ultimate Gacha System: Reborn As A Mob in My Favorite Game

Chapter 136: Imperial Cross

She sniffled sharply, rubbing her nose with the back of her tiny hand as her wings vibrated with nervous static.

"If that silver-haired prick had actually hollowed out your core and wiped your consciousness... the inner domain would have collapsed," she mumbled, pouting so hard her bottom lip stuck out. "I would have been completely digested along with the rest of your souls. So... obviously I was worried about what happened to you! It’s basic self-preservation!"

"Uh-huh," Klaus drawled, a knowing smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Basic self-preservation. That’s why you kept pumping ozone into my blood even when it was costing you your own core stability."

"It was sensible!" she yelled with her whole tiny face glowing neon blue now. "And... and maybe..."

She trailed off with her tiny boots fidgeting together in the air.

She stared fixedly at the top of his silver collarbone with her voice dropping into a rapid embarrassed whisper that she clearly hated herself for vocalizing.

"...maybe walking around with a reckless mortal thug wasn’t the absolute worst thing in the world, even if you killed my former Master." she grudgingly admitted. "You treat me like your disposable tool and while I don’t like it, You actually let me hit things. So... fine! I don’t completely hate you! I actually like being your spirit, okay?! Are you happy now, you smug bastard?!"

The exact second the confession left her mouth, the crushing weight of her own vulnerability and tsundere embarrassment completely overloaded her tiny physical brain.

She looked up, saw the knowing smirk plastered across Klaus’s handsome face, and completely lost her temper.

"DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!" she shrieked.

She didn’t try to punch him this time.

She threw both of her tiny physical hands straight out in front of her chest, leveling her palms directly at the bridge of Klaus’s nose at zero-distance.

CRACK!

A blinding concentrated bolt of high-voltage blue-white lightning violently erupted directly from her palms, fired point-blank right into Klaus’s face with enough voltage to melt solid iron into slag.

Across the room, Mirela screamed in alarm, starting to rush forward with her staff raised.

Klaus didn’t flinch.

He didn’t need to dodge, and he didn’t need to raise his arm to cast a complex defensive spell.

He simply thought it...

In the exact microsecond before the blinding bolt of plasma struck his skin, his Soul King authority responded seamlessly to his will.

A razor-thin completely transparent veil of pure white Soul Mana instantly snapped into existence exactly one inch in front of the bridge of his nose.

KRA-ZAP!

The point-blank lightning bolt slammed dead center into the transparent barrier.

The impact produced a sharp deafening crack that rang through the tower, but the lightning didn’t pierce the veil.

The raw screaming electrical voltage hit the condensed divine mana and immediately shattered, violently dispersing outward across the barrier in a dazzling harmless shower of crackling blue static and harmless sparks that washed smoothly over Klaus’s long silver hair and broad shoulders like a small fireworks display.

The light faded and the smoke cleared.

Klaus stood perfectly still in the center of the falling blue sparks, holding the suspended fairy by the scruff of her collar.

His face was completely untouched, his smirk intact, and his silver eyes glowing gently in the dim firelight.

The tiny elemental hung there in his grip with her arms still extended, panting heavily as small wisps of blue smoke drifted up from her fingertips.

She looked at the transparent barrier that had effortlessly absorbed her best shot, looked at Klaus’s unbothered smile, and slowly let her arms drop to her sides with a defeated sulky huff.

"Show-off..." she muttered under her breath, turning her head away to pout at the wall.

Klaus chuckled softly, uncurling his fingers and releasing the scruff of her tunic.

Instead of flying away or launching another attack, the tiny blonde elemental buzzed her lightning wings, doing a quick mid-air loop before dropping down to land squarely on his right shoulder.

She anchored her tiny bare feet firmly into the dark fabric of his combat shirt, crossed her arms over her chest, and leaned her back against the side of his neck, completely claiming the spot as her territory.

Klaus brushed a stray spark of blue static from his sleeve, looking across the room toward Mirela and Anya, simply smiling at his new tsundere summon.

"Don’t worry, it’s just her way of showing love..."

"I’ll blast you!"

Outside the massive open double doors at the far end of the hall, the Winterlands wind was howling through the monoliths, kicking up powdery sprays of snow across the threshold.

With Ryoki’s oppressive aura completely gone, the spatial barrier sealing the tower off from the rest of the Winterlands was coming apart.

One could actually hear the weather again... they could feel the biting sub-zero draft fighting against the pale light emanating from the runes carved into the obsidian pillars.

Klaus sat on the edge of the salvaged caravan mattress, now leaning his back against the cold stone of the nearest column.

He ran a hand through the long silver hair falling over his shoulders.

He was still trying to get used to the weight of it. Every time he turned his head, the heavy strands slid across his collarbone like cold silk.

"Alright," Klaus said, breaking the quiet of the hall.

He looked across the dying embers of the campfire toward Mirela and Anya.

"Let’s talk properly. If we’re hitting the road at first light, we need to figure out how we’re actually getting out of this graveyard without freezing to death or leaving half our supplies behind."

Mirela was sitting cross-legged on a wooden supply crate opposite him, her moon-crystal staff resting across her knees.

She had calmed down since washing up earlier, though her blue eyes still avoided lingering on his bare chest for too long.

"We salvaged what we could after the pack hit Lord Varhem’s caravan..." Mirela reported. "We have enough dried jerky and salted rations to last three people roughly two weeks if we don’t gorge ourselves. We also have two crates of iron skin-salve, four spare rolls of heavy fur blankets, and three flasks of heating oil."

"That covers the consumables," Klaus noted, resting his elbows on his knees. "What about the transport itself? We can’t carry three wooden crates, two heavy packs, and ourselves on foot across miles of untracked snowpack."

Mirela sighed with her goat ears dropping slightly.

"The original carriages are firewood, Master. When the barrier came down on the whole thing... it split it in half so there really isn’t much left of the carriage to be honest."

"And the beast?" Klaus asked.

"The giant mountain bear made it like we talked about earlier," she confirmed. "It’s currently dug into a drift between two stone pillars, chewing on what’s left of a frozen guard carcass... It’s healthy enough to pull heavy weight, but if we don’t have a working wagon frame, we’re going to have to lash some of the broken timber together into a crude drag-sled."

Klaus grimaced, shaking his head.

"A drag-sled across raw snow means our travel speed gets cut to a crawl. Plus, it leaves our food crates completely exposed to the wind, sleet, and whatever roaming monsters decide to wander back into the valley once this tower’s barrier drops for good..."

He hated the idea of dragging a makeshift raft of sticks through a frozen wasteland.

Back on Earth, moving through bad weather with broken equipment was miserable enough; out here, where the cold literally drained your stamina if you didn’t have heavy insulation, it was asking for hypothermia or an ambush.

"There is no need to drag timber through the mud, Father..." a small quiet voice chimed in from the right side of the mattress.

Anya sat neatly with her legs folded beneath her, her pale hands resting on the fabric of her blue dress.

Her purple eyes reflected the orange glow of the embers as she looked up at him. She didn’t sound worried about broken axles or crushed wood.

She sounded entirely unbothered.

"My mother’s lineage grants precise structural manipulation over physical matter within a space..." Anya explained, tilting her head slightly. "While I don’t have the offensive output of an adult Shinigami yet, repairing broken wooden architecture is basic spatial binding. I can gather the shattered carriage frames from outside, bind the wood back together using dark mana threads, and weld anything that’s needed back to place"

Mirela blinked, her ears perking right back up. "Wait. You can fix the carriage? Like, the whole thing?"

"Better than the carpenters built it," Anya stated flatly. "I can seal the outer hull against the frost so the interior stays warm against the wind... The mountain bear will have a fully functioning wagon to haul by sunrise."

Klaus let out a low whistle, leaning back against the pillar with a genuine grin.

"Well, damn. Look at that. We’ve got our own personal mechanic. That completely wipes out our transport bottleneck."

"It’s just basic problem-solving," Anya murmured, though the faint pink tinge that touched her cheeks showed she didn’t mind the praise at all.

With their immediate logistics sorted and the threat of freezing to death on a drag-sled off the table, the atmosphere inside the cavernous ground floor changed.

The heavy weight that had pressed down on them ever since they first entered the Endless Tower finally lifted.

They had food, they had heat, and they had a secure ride home.

Klaus looked around the silent hall. The only sound was the occasional pop of the embers and the howling wind outside.

"Alright," Klaus said, stretching his arms over his head until his joints popped. "Since we’re stuck sitting here until dawn anyway, we need a distraction... Staring at each other or counting the cracks in the stone for the next six hours is going to drive us all out of our minds."

On his right shoulder, Sparky... the tiny blonde Lightning Fairy he had configured earlier let out an annoyed buzz of her plasma wings.

She had settled into the fabric of his shirt, crossing her tiny arms and glaring out at the room.

"Speak for yourself, meatbag," the tiny fairy grumbled in her high-pitched voice, discharging a tiny, harmless spark against his collarbone. "I spent a long time stuck with your statues. I can stare at a rock for six hours without complaining."

"You complained for twenty minutes straight after I gave you a body..." Klaus reminded her dryly.

"That was about your swordsmanship!" she snapped back, pulling on a strand of his silver hair.

Across the embers, Anya looked up thoughtfully.

She raised her small right hand, palm facing upward toward the ceiling. A soft violet haze began to swirl around her fingers.

Within seconds, the dark mana condensed, drawing physical mass from the air until it solidified into a neat, rectangular deck of heavy bone cards inscribed with glowing blue symbols.

"If we need a way to pass the time before sleeping," Anya offered, smoothly shuffling the heavy bone cards between her tiny hands, "we can play a standard card game."

Mirela leaned forward off her crate, her blue eyes lighting up as she recognized the glowing symbols on the backs of the cards.

"Oh! Imperial Cross!" she exclaimed with her leg thumping happily against the floor. "The other maids used to play this when I still worked for Lord Verakan... I haven’t played it since then."

Klaus raised an eyebrow. "Imperial what?"

He didn’t remember this from the game.

"Imperial Cross!" Mirela repeated eagerly, sliding off her crate to sit cross-legged directly on the obsidian floor between Klaus and Anya. "It’s a bluffing and betting game, Master. It’s really popular among mercenaries and even nobles."

"Alright," Klaus said, shifting forward off the mattress to sit on the floor across from her. "Walk me through the rules. If I’m putting my dignity on the line against a six-year-old Shinigami and you, I at least want to know how the board works."

Mirela took the deck from Anya’s hands, spreading five cards out face-up on the stone floor to demonstrate.

"Every card has a number from one to ten, and belongs to one of four suits: Frost, Iron, Blood, or Crown..." Mirela explained, pointing to the glowing blue engravings on the bone tiles. "At the start of a round, everyone gets dealt five cards, and we put a pool of mana crystals in the center of the table as betting chips."

She tapped a card showing a jagged red symbol.

"On your turn, you can play a card face-up into your line to build your score by matching suits or chaining numbers or, you can sacrifice a card face-down into the center trench. Sacrificing into the trench lets you steal chips from the pot, or forces someone else to discard one of the cards in their line."

"So it’s a mix of poker, set collection, and direct sabotage," Klaus analyzed, nodding slowly. "How do you actually win the pot?"

"When the deck runs out or someone plays a rank-ten Crown card, the round locks," Mirela said, grinning. "Whoever has the highest total military value on the table takes all the chips. But if you bluff someone into folding their hand early, you take the pot without even having to show your cards."